The choice of filesystems on Linux is vast, but most people will stick with their respective distributions' default choices, which will most likely be ext3, but you're free to use ReiserFS, XFS, or something else completely if you so desire. Things are about to change though, with btrfs just around the corner. To bridge the gap between now and btfrs, ext3 has been updated to ext4, which adds some interesting features like extents, which are already in use in most other popular file systems. Phoronix decided it was time to do some performance checking on ext4.

Exactly.. most of these benchmarkers are either Linux ignorant or have an axe to grind. Interestingly, OSNews and LWN both failed to pick up my roundup of Linux file systems. I'm going to do some benchmarking of ext2/3/4, XFS, JFS, Reiser3, and Btrfs when kernel 2.6.28 goes stable.

JFS is an excellent file system. I wish it would get some developer attention, as I'm sure it could be improved quite a bit to take advantage of modern kernel features.

Would be something to read, but one aspect that annoys me about ext3 is when a user comes to me and say, "I have deleted accidentally some important files! Can you help me?". Do you know if they changed that irritating inode block pointers zeroing on ext4?

I have used ext3grep with a so-so success and some forensics tools from time to time. I know that exist some apps that monitor and save the needed information to restore files but I'm afraid of use them on a corp environment and get affect by some obscure bug and/or instability issues.